Francesco Clemente - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 8881582821 ISBN 13: 9788881582822

Publisher: Charta, 2000

Synopsis

These recent works by renowned Italian painter Francesco Clemente prove that his oeuvre has grown richer and more complex over the years. They are driven in particular by an emphasis on color: in some works Clemente limits himself to warm oranges and greens, creating a soft, sensuous atmosphere that reflects his lifelong love of India and Tantrism. In others--specifically the "grisaille self-portraits"--there is an emphasis on darker tones that recalls classic Western painters like Titian and Rembrandt, and points to more intimate areas of the self. It is through this meeting and mixture of the aesthetic languages of East and West that Clemente has produced his best work, and this monograph testifies to the pleasures of an art that overcomes such boundaries in its exploration of psychological and spiritual dimensions.

About this title

Review

Francesco Clemente, who enlivened the New York art scene in the 1980s along with a handful of other image-conscious Italians, including Sandra Chia, is said to be a reclusive artist who guards his privacy, but this richly informative book makes that assertion difficult to believe. Clemente himself has always offered a good deal of autobiography to his viewers, with works that have explored his own visage (and other parts) with relentless interest and introspection. And now comes Francesco Clemente, filled with intimate pictures shot by his friend Luca Babini in Clemente studios from New York to New Mexico to Naples. Packed to bursting, the photographs show Clemente working away, with wife, kids, and dogs in tow. With its pictorial richness--paint-spattered floors, trampled rags, stacked canvases, raw-edged, unstretched paintings stapled to huge walls, encrusted studio shoes, and scores of photographs of works in progress--this book will be devoured by other artists, who will turn the pages in a lather of envy, not necessarily for Clemente's fame and success, but for the huge windows and high ceilings of his various work spaces.

Clemente is a fecund artist, and there are many wonderful shots of his art--whole walls and tables full of it--that make a succinct statement correlating productivity and achievement. Clemente has contributed a kind of prose poem for the first part of the book, in which he discusses being a painter, and there is also a rambling essay by art writer Rene Ricard on artists' studios from ancient Egypt to the Renaissance. But the pictures are the point of this book, and they handsomely reward the reader's attention. They constitute an invitation to spend time--years, in fact--with a painter whose inventiveness, ambition, and style have made him one of the most successful of his time. --Peggy Moorman

About the Author

Luca Babini, a well-known photographer and filmmaker, lives in New York City.

Edition details

• Publisher: Charta
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 8881582821
• ISBN 13: 9788881582822
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 64